So, on Tuesday night I took a break from Python, Next.js, coding challenges and data structures & algorithms and built out a revised resume in nothing but plain HTML & CSS. I used it as an exercise so I could experiment with some of the stuff that had caught my interest last week – HTML details & summary elements, CSS outline-offset and fluid typography (basically responsive fonts).

It took me a few hours to get things done, but the project was fun and I got to remember why I like reusable components so much – repeating my code with HTML made me itchy to just pivot to at least JavaScript and write something more DRY out, but I resisted and made myself do it the more tedious way.

1. I really like details & summary. After using it, I can see a bunch of different applications for it, from just the informational FAQ-type implementation that I used on the resume to menus and (with some CSS finagling for styling) even building out interfaces with cards that are actually summary elements. I plan on testing this out more in the future.
2. Outline-offset offers a nice option for styling elements without affecting layout. I went really basic, but by styling the outline, and even combining it with transforms or transitions, I think it can liven up interactive parts of a website really well. Offering responses to interactions and generally just keeping the user oriented are important to me, so I like having an extra tool at hand to help with that.
3. Fluid typography is nice to look at. I wasted too much time playing with page widths because of this. I still did couple it with media queries and breakpoints to force different base font sizes before applying view-width modifiers to fonts, but together they made it so that I really didn’t need to do very much at all to make the resume responsive. Letting css-grid or flexbox handle layout and just populating containers with responsive images and text is how I’m going to build most of my projects going forward.

I’m messing with irregularly-shaped elements now. I had started doing that a bit a few weeks ago, and I finally sat and played around with parallax scroll effects a bit last night, so I’m looking forward to adding those to projects. I keep thinking that I might enjoy design more than development, at least with regard to front-end, but I’m not really a designer by any stretch.

Also, I have what I need from the federal, state and city governments now, so I should be able to start looking for clients for the web design company I started at the beginning of the year. I want to revise all of the copy on the site, and then I’ll begin figuring out how to get clients and build websites. I’m doing everything in my power to course-correct the train-wreck that 2020 was. I hope everyone else out there is making progress too.

Here’s a link to a deployed version of my resume on Netlify.